Pros & Cons:

Modern UI design, clean dashboard; fast and reliable; hash many files at once with drag & drop; modern hash algorithms support; manual and automatic calculations.

Support major algorithms but fewer than those supported by Hashtab.

Our Review:

Hashing (also known as #ashing) is a freeware, standalone utility for Windows, capable of performing MD5, SHA1, and SHA-2 family. It has a Modern UI design, with clean interface. This application depends on .NET 2.0 or superior (should be present in almost every windows 7/8 or superior PC). #ashing is built upon OpenSSL (linked statically), which is native code, so it's fast, even for bigger files ( 4 GB or even more). It performs the calculation on a background thread, so it won't freeze the screen. It also does not raise CPU use too much. The time-complexity of this app, as analyzed in OpenSSL code, is a linear dependency of BigO(n), for all algorithms supported by the app.

It has a reliable progress bar and a button for cancelling the operation;

Free for all uses, no registration needed, no pro version;

No installer needed;

You can hash many files at once, just drag & drop. You can save a report as a text file or copy to clipboard;

One especially noteworthy feature of this application is that since hashing functions play other roles in cryptography than serving as check-sums, such as digital signature validation, or salting passwords, #ashing provides a convenient feature for "Manual input" for easily pasting hexadecimal buffers from source code instead of having to save them on a file, and then hashing them from there. Finally, although the security of MD5 and SHA-1 is currently considered suspect, nonetheless, their inclusion in this application is a benefit due to the vast number legacy instances wherein these protocols are still in use.

Editor’s Conclusions: #ashing appears to be a reliable, fast, and well designed application. In addition to its speed, it has an intuitive, clean dashboard, and provides for manual and automatic calculations. It should prove a valuable resource for software developers, delivering DLLs, .LIBs and .SOs to clients; so that if a client complains that there is a bug or that something is not working right, this application allows them to verify the digests of the suspect files to guarantee they have the latest libraries.